Seeking Free Quality Streaming? Try Plex.

If we’re being honest, the streaming app that your correspondent uses most — more than Netflix or Amazon Prime or Hulu, and more than any of the less-recognizable subscription streamers we’ve previously spotlighted here — is Plex, though for reasons owing less to its current iteration than to its humble beginnings.

Plex launched in the late 2000s as free media-server software, allowing its users to set up a client-server on either their home computer or on a network-attached storage device for their personal libraries of movies, television episodes and music. Setup and integration are fairly simple, and once the app has been directed to the user’s files, it matches titles to its database of films and shows, which can be streamed to a variety of devices (including Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire and smart TVs). Best of all, you can share your libraries with friends, and vice versa, for either individual or “watch together” viewing. It’s a nifty way to watch whatever you want, wherever you want — for free, at least in its basic form. (The paid “Plex Pass” offers additional bells and whistles.)

Of course, it’s difficult for a service to make money functioning solely as a free app for personal streaming, so Plex began expanding its offerings and utility in recent years. In 2019, the app added live TV streaming and DVR functionality, allowing its users the option of full-on cord cutting for an additional monthly fee. The following year, Plex introduced its ad-supported video on demand (AVOD) streaming service and free-to-stream live TV channels. As with Tubi, Pluto TV and other AVOD services, the automated commercial breaks aren’t always executed with finesse; the breaks sometimes fall mid-scene, or even midsentence. But it’s hard to complain when it comes with a $0 price tag.

This February, Plex launched another feature: a VOD rental service, allowing viewers to shell out a few bucks to stream new releases in the app, rather than in Amazon, Apple or Vudu. Sure, it’s a revenue-generator, but it also helps make Plex, in its own words, something of a concierge service. With the “Universal Watchlist” function, you tell the app which streaming services you use, and thereafter, whenever you add a movie or show to your watchlist, it will show you where to find it: via one of your other services, in a media library (yours or a friend’s) or through Plex’s own AVOD or VOD portals. It essentially makes the app the center of your streaming universe, and in an increasingly convoluted digital media landscape, that’s a useful function indeed.

Here are a few highlights from their current AVOD offerings:

‘Master of the Flying Guillotine’: This 1976 wuxia epic from the writer, director and star Jimmy Wang Yu is one of the era’s most beloved martial arts extravaganzas. Technically a sequel to Wang Yu’s smash “One-Armed Boxer” from the previous year, this tale of a blind warrior seeking revenge against Wang Yu’s antihero is full of clever innovations and complications in its plentiful action sequences. Most impressively, the filmmaker shoots his action scenes the way a fighter fights, up close and personal, with the graceful camera right in the middle of the bone-cracking action.